But Barack Obama simply refuses to call the Islamic State, who now controls a third of Syria, as either Islamic or a state. Instead, in his speech of Sept. 10, 2014 and since, he calls ISIS jihadists — who have been slaughtering Christians in Iraq, Syria, and most recently beheading 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya — generic “terrorists.”

Incredibly, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf recently proclaimed that America can’t win against the Islamic State “by killing them” and ought instead to focus on addressing their root problem of a poor economy and a lack of job opportunities.

While treating the jihadists with denial and kid gloves, Obama doesn’t hesitate to identify millions of “right wing” Americans as “extremist terrorists,” the latest example being an intelligence assessment by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Evan Perez and Wes Bruer report for CNN, Feb. 20, 2015, that a new intelligence assessment, circulated by the DHS this month, focuses on the “domestic terror threat from right-wing sovereign citizen extremists,” who reject government authority, carry out sporadic terror attacks on police, and threaten to attack other government buildings.

Some federal and local law enforcement groups view the domestic terror threat from sovereign citizen groups as equal to — and in some cases greater than — the threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS.​

Note: The sovereign citizen movement is a loosely affiliated group of Americans who believe they are free people and reject many elements of federal, state and local governance, including, but not limited to, taxation.According to Colorado Prowers County Undersheriff Ron Trowbridge, he was told at a Colorado State Police training session on April 1, 2013, that sovereign citizen groups include Americans who believe the United States was founded on godly principles and “fundamentalist” Christianswho take the Bible literally. (See Trail Dust’s “Have you ever heard of a ‘Sovereign Citizen’?“)

The DHS report, produced in coordination with the FBI, defines sovereign citizens as “extremists” who believe they can ignore laws and that their individual rights are under attack in routine daily instances such as a traffic stop or being required to obey a court order. The report counts 24 “violent” sovereign citizen-related attacks across the U.S. since 2010, including:

In 2012, a father and son allegedly engaged in a shootout with police in Louisiana in which two officers were killed and several others wounded. The confrontation began with an officer pulling them over for a traffic violation. The men were sovereign citizen “extremists” who claimed police had no authority over them.

In 2013, a man who held anti-government views carried out a shooting attack on three Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees at Los Angeles International Airport, killing one TSA officer.

In 2014, a couple killed two police officers and a bystander at a Las Vegas Walmart store.

Other findings in the DHS intelligence assessment include:

An expectation that sovereign citizen “violence during 2015 will occur most frequently during routine law enforcement encounters at a suspect’s home, during enforcement stops and at government offices.”

“Law enforcement officers will remain the primary target of (sovereign citizen) violence over the next year due to their role in physically enforcing laws and regulations.”

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, said that by some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism, with a core of perhaps 100,000. Potok says sovereign citizen groups have attracted support because of poor economic conditions. Some groups travel the country pitching their ideology as a way to help homeowners escape foreclosure or get out of debt by simply ignoring the courts and bankruptcy law.

While groups like ISIS and al Qaeda garner the most attention, for many local cops, the danger is closer to home. A survey last year of state and local law enforcement officers listed “sovereign citizen terrorists” as the top domestic terror threat, ahead of foreign Islamists and domestic militia groups. The survey was part of a study produced by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

The DHS intelligence assessment coincides with the Obama administration’s convening of a White House summit on fighting “violent extremism” last week.

Penny Starr reports for CNS News, Feb. 19, 2015, that the second day of the summit had opened with a Muslim prayer by an imam, Sheikh Sa’ad Musse Roble of the Minneapolis’ World Peace [sic] Organization, following remarks by Obama administration officials and Democratic members of Congress. No other faiths were represented.

This is not the first time that the DHS identifies “right wing” Americans as “domestic terrorists.

In 2012, a DHS-funded study, Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008 — by the same University of Maryland National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism that conducted the 2014 survey of state and local police officers — characterized Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.

In fact, University of Maryland’s National Consortium was launched with the aid of DHS, that is, taxpayers’, funding to the tune of $12 million.

On May 11, 2005, exploiting Americans’ fear of terrorism after 9/11, Congress and the Bush administration enacted the Real I.D. Act in the name of national security. (See “National ID card for every American“)

Real I.D. is an effective National ID card. All 50 constituent States in America are required to federalize their driver’s licenses by making them conform to national federal standards. Even non-drivers will be issued an ID card, thereby putting the lie to Real ID being just a driver’s license. That ID card contains all sorts of information on you which are entered into a national database and accessible and shared by the 50 state authorities. The information includes:

This is Nevada’s Real ID card — an “enhanced” driver’s license. The star in a gold circle in the top right indicates DMV has “checked out” your background.

After a yearlong period of deferred enforcement, implementation of Phase 1 of the Real ID Act began on January 20, 2014, with at least 21 states now fully compliant. There are four planned phases, three of which apply to areas that affect relatively few U.S. citizens—e.g., DHS headquarters, nuclear power plants, and restricted and semi-restricted federal facilities.

Phase 4 applies to boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft. The TSA recently announced that Phase 4, requiring a Real ID to board domestic flights, will be implemented in a year — by 2016.

Activist Post reports, Feb. 1, 2015, that by then, the Real IDs will have already performed extensive background checks on everyone who receives them and will feature stars and other markings to indicate good behavior. No word on markings for troublemakers.

Since its inception, civil liberties advocates have had concerns that those without these intrusive new IDs will be excluded from basic human rights like working or traveling. The KTVN news report below appears to confirm this agenda.

KTVN reporter Ellen Breen states that by July 2016, Nevadans must present either a passport or a Real ID card to board a commercial airplane.

“It’s a choice,” says Nevada DMV official David Fierro, “you don’t have to get a Real ID card, but if you want to get on an airplane after 2016, you’re going to have to have a Real ID card.”

Nevada’s Real ID card looks like a regular driver’s license but with a white star in a gold circle in the top right corner. The star indicates the DMV has checked out your background.

In my postof July 9, I had observed that, given our open southern border, why are we even bothering with TSA security checkpoints at U.S. airports?

Now comes news that the Transport Security Administration (TSA) is allowing illegal aliens, coming in by the thousands across the Mexico border, to board passenger planes WITHOUT valid IDs.

In so doing, Obama’s TSA — an agency under the ironically named Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — is not only making a mockery of airline security, but also endangering every passenger in every commercial plane.

Illegal aliens are being allowed to fly on commercial airliners without valid identification, according to the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC). “The aliens who are getting released on their own recognizance are being allowed to board and travel commercial airliners by simply showing their Notice to Appear forms,” NBPC’s Local 2455 Spokesman, Hector Garza, told Breitbart Texas.

“This is not the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] or another federal agency renting or leasing an aircraft, these are the same planes that the American public uses for domestic travel,” said Garza. “This just adds insult to injury. Not only are we releasing unknown illegal aliens onto American streets, but we are allowing them to travel commercially using paperwork that could easily be reproduced or manipulated on any home computer. The Notice to Appear form has no photo, anyone can make one and manipulate one. They do not have any security features, no watermark, nothing. They are simply printed on standard copy paper based on the information the illegal alien says is the truth.”

Spokesman Garza continued, “We do not know who these people are, we often have to solely rely on who they say they are, where they say they came from, and the history they say they have. We know nothing about most of them, ICE releases them into the American public, and now they are boarding aircraft at will with a simple paper document that anyone can easily alter or reproduce themselves.”

The shocking assertions by Garza were further validated by the national body of the NBPC. Breitbart Texas obtained an exclusive statement from the NBPC.

“The National Border Patrol Council adamantly opposes the decision of DHS to release the illegal aliens who have been transported from the Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sector to other locations for processing. The lack of consequences has furthered this crisis and will only continue to do so. The fact that TSA is accepting the I-862 (Notice to Appear) as a form of identification and allowing illegal aliens to travel commercially shows just how little regard the federal government has for its own immigration laws.”

Breitbart Texas also spoke with Shawn Moran, the vice president of the NBPC and he stated, “Why waste money and effort transporting people from the RGV if we are only going to release them with no real way to track them? Why are we allowing them to travel commercially using paperwork that could easily be reproduced or manipulated on any home computer.”

Spokesman Garza highlighted the significance of the NBPC’s assertions regarding security threats posed to the American public and stated, “The threat this poses from terrorists upon the American people is absolutely unacceptable. Central Americans are not the only people crossing our border and being released. Does anyone actually think that cartels and others criminal or possible terrorist organizations are not taking advantage of the fact that we are having to leave our border wide open while we reassigning the majority of our agents to process family units and minors? Of course this situation is being exploited by such threats.”

The concerns raised by the NBPC about possible security risks, especially in regards to the safety of commercial airliners, are reinforced by a 2012 United Nations (UN) report previously covered by this reporter. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s “Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean” revealed that individuals from the terror-prone Somalia were traveling to Central America in efforts to illegally enter the United States. The report states:

“Central Americans are not the only ones being smuggled through Mexico to the United States. Irregular migrants from the Horn of Africa (Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia), as well as South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, India), China, and other African and Asian states are being smuggled through Central America.”

In light of the UN report, possible public safety risks posed by illegal aliens who claim to be from Central America flying unidentified and without effective documentation are further illuminated by a previous in-depth analysis of Somalia by the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations. They wrote on Somalia:

“Its porous borders mean that individuals can enter without visas, and once inside the country, enjoy an almost complete lack of law enforcement. Somalia has long served as a passageway from Africa to the Middle East based on its coastal location on the Horn of Africa, just a boat ride away from Yemen. These aspects make Somalia a desirable haven for transnational terrorists, something Al-Qaeda has tried to capitalize on before, and is trying again now.”

Breitbart Texas reached out to the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) for comment without receiving a response at the time of this article’s publication.

Next, since Congress could not pass an immigration reform amnesty law, the POS simply took matters into his own hands and let loose a tidal wave of illegals — of criminal gang members, sick people with infectious tuberculosis, unaccompanied minors youths including hundreds of toddlers — across the Mexican border into America.

Note: As FOTM’s Trail Dust points out, calling these illegals “unaccompanied minors” is a misnomer — a calculated move by the Obama regime and their willing accomplices in the media to gain our sympathy. The truth is many of these “unaccompanied minors” are criminals and gangsters in the late teens who have perpetrated torture and murder. See “We need to re-define the term ‘minors’.“

The human wave is unprecedented. The state of Texas alone is inundated with 35,000 illegals a month. At this rate, the surge is expected to increase to up to 90,000 a month across the Southwest border by the end of the year. (Source: Los Angeles Times)

The human tidal wave pouring across the border is spurred by newspapers and television stations throughout Central America falsely reporting that amnesty will be theirs if they can just make it through the Mexican border — and that the time to do it is now.

The Obama administration isn’t doing anything to counter the false reporting or dissuade the incoming hordes. There hasn’t been a word from the White House or U.S. embassies urging families in Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador not to send their children alone through Mexico’s merciless badlands infested with cartel criminals to reach the U.S. And once they’re here, instead of deporting the unaccompanied minors youths, Obama’s Health & Human Services (HHS) is releasing them to their adult family members in the United States who are also here illegally.To add insult upon injury, HHS is not making even a minimum effort to determine the immigration status of the adult family members.

All of which led to the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers to declare that the human tidal wave is orchestrated.The association said: “Certainly we are not gullible enough to believe that thousands of unaccompanied minor Central American children came to America without the encouragement, aid and assistance of the United States government.“

Not long ago, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a foe of illegal immigration, stated that based on evidence he’d seen and conversations he had with lawmen, there appeared to be an ongoing political campaign to destroy law enforcement at the border— something the former border agents called an effort to create “a failed state” on the border. If so, it’sa page straight out of the Cloward-Piven theory President Obama was so influenced by as a community organizer and at Columbia.

Cloward-Piven Strategy is a strategy of manufactured crisis. First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of welfare demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

A San Antonio Air Force base, a California Navy base, and a makeshift detention center in Nogales, Arizona have become temporary shelters for children and youths caught crossing the border without their parents.

Now, after weeks of the unabated tidal wave of illegals pouring into Texas, the state’s leaders are taking action.

Anna M. Tinsley reports for the (Texas) Star-Telegram, that on June 18, 2014, Texas officials directed Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers to begin a surge to secure the Texas-Mexico border in the wake of a growing number of immigrants flooding into the southern part of the state.

Gov. Rick Perry said in a statement:

“Texas can’t afford to wait for Washington to act on this crisis and we will not sit idly by while the safety and security of our citizens are threatened. Until the federal government recognizes the danger it’s putting our citizens in by its inaction to secure the border, Texas law enforcement must do everything they can to keep our citizens and communities safe.”

Gov. Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Joe Straus released a joint letter directing DPS officials to move forward with surge operations through at least the end of the calendar year, using any money allocated for the agency. The plan is to spend $1.3 million a week to try to combat the problem, even as a group of conservative state lawmakers asked them to call the legislature back to work in a special session to address the situation. An online petition launched last week has drawn more than 4,500 signatures from those who want the legislature called back to work.

Some Democrats have said adding resources to the border is not the solution, without offering an alternative to Perry et al.‘s plan. State Sen. Jose Rodriguez (D-El Paso) said, “What is needed are not more ‘boots on the ground’ or any other euphemisms for the militarization that both impacts border residents’ daily lives and is inadequate to deal with the specific issue at hand.”

Republican State Rep. Jonathan Stickland is planning to head to the border next week. He said he would like the state legislature to first help children who are here illegally. Then he wants the state to “turn off all the benefits we can from the state level” — such as health care — to reduce the draw for immigrants. He also urges his fellow lawmakers to authorize a surge to identify and stop people benefiting from the immigration boom, such as sex or human traffickers.

Lastly, it is not just Amerika’s southern border that is being breached. FOTM just received this email from a reader:

I have 2 friends who work for TSA that confirmed we are getting plane loads from Iraq and Syria, by way of London and Paris. They [TSA agents] are being forced into mandatory OT [overtime]. Which is otherwise severely frowned upon. It probably won’t be reported until somebody screams. It’s not just the southern borders. Canada refuses to take them BTW. But because we take in war refugees they are coming here. You have more contacts than I do. Be on the look out. Congress suffers from inertia

The extent and scope of the DHS’ lethality and surveillance are even worse than what we know — much much worse. Coming from a constitutional lawyer, this should be taken seriously and widely disseminated to your Facebook, Twitter, and email lists.

“If once they [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, 1787.

Bloggers have been sounding the alarm on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for some time now, but our alarms are ignored by the establishment media.

Writing for Texas’ Journal Friendswood, a reputable constitutional attorney is joining the chorus.

John W. Whitehead is a constitutional attorney, the founder and president of The Rutherford Institute — a non-profit organization dedicated to the defense of civil liberties, especially religious liberties, and human rights — and author of A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State(SelectBooks).

NTSB to check whether Chicago train operator dozed before crash

AP4:09 p.m. EDT March 25, 2014

CHICAGO (AP) – An emergency track-side braking system activated but failed to stop a Chicago commuter train from jumping the tracks and barreling to the top of an escalator at O’Hare International Airport, a federal investigator said Tuesday.

The events that led to Monday’s accident, which occurred around 3 a.m. and injured more than 30 passengers, might have begun with the train operator dozing off toward the end of her shift, according to the union representing transit workers. But Tuesday’s announcement that a piece of emergency safety equipment might have failed was the first indication the accident could have been caused by human error and mechanical failure.

National Transportation Safety Board investigator Ted Turpin said a preliminary review showed the train was traveling at the correct speed of 25 mph as it entered the station. Investigators said they have not yet determined whether the operator ever applied the in-cab brake.

Turpin, who is leading the investigation, said an automatic emergency braking system located on the tracks was activated but failed to stop the train as it burst onto the platform.

“It activated,” Turpin said of the emergency system. “That’s all we know factually. Now, whether it did it in time or not, that’s an analysis that we have to figure out.”

A team from the NTSB also is exploring how rested the train operator was before starting her shift and whether rules governing overtime had been violated, after a union official suggested she might have dozed off.

They planned to interview the train operator Tuesday afternoon.

“We’re going to ask probably the operator how they felt … because we always take into consideration the fatigue factor. It’s one of the things we do investigate,” Turpin said.

The operator, whom officials have not identified, was off duty for about 17 hours before starting work around 8 p.m. Sunday but had recently put in a lot of overtime, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 President Robert Kelly said Monday.

“I know she works a lot – as a lot of our members do,” he said. “They gotta earn a living. … She was extremely tired.”

Kelly said the operator took standard drug and alcohol tests after the derailment and that she assured him they were not an issue.

Federal investigators hoped to turn the scene over to local officials later Tuesday to begin removing the train from the escalator at the underground Chicago Transit Authority station.

The train is designed to stop if operators become incapacitated and their hand slips off the spring-loaded controls. Kelly speculated that, upon impact, inertia might have thrown the operator against the hand switch, accelerating it onto the escalator.

Most people today think it improper to discipline children,so I have tried other methods to control my kids whenthey have had one of ‘those moments’.

Since I’m a pilot, one method that I have found very effectiveis for me to just take the child for a short flight during whichI say nothing, and give the child the opportunity to reflecton his or her behaviour.

I don’t know whether it’s the steady vibration from the engines, or just the time away from any distractions such as TV, video games, computer, iPod, etc.

Either way, my kids usually calm down and stop misbehavingafter our flight together. I believe that eye to eye contactduring these sessions is an important element in achievingthe desired results.

I’ve included a photo below of one of my sessions with my son, in case you’d like to use the technique.